Global computer networks, such as the Internet, are increasingly being used for marketing and advertisements, encroaching into advertising markets traditionally reserved for printed media (e.g., newspapers and magazine) and/or television. Online advertisements often appear on web sites or web pages of the World Wide Web (WWW) in a form of banner ads, or the like. There are also other web sites that are fan sites (or forum sites) utilized for discussing particular interests or hobbies. These fan sites normally consist of message forums and other venues for disseminating information over the global computer networks, are being used to portray certain products or brands in a positive or negative light, and can be important sources of consumer feedback for advertisers, manufacturers and consumers alike.
Since these fan sites tend to have smaller audiences, one should advertise across many of them to reach a sizable market. While this market is highly desirable, the problem is that one needs to work through many different sites to reach the market. Also, since each fan site typically requires a fee for placing an advertisement, it is impractical or impossible to place advertisements on each and every one of them. Therefore, the advertisers, manufacturers or those seeking to reach the market through the fan sites must select the right fan sites on which to place their advertisements. Further, these sites tend to be less professional than typical larger sites (Yahoo, CNN, etc.) that sell ad spaces so it is desirable to have them fit into a set standard for distributing and processing ads.
Due to a generally large number of fan sites available for placing advertisements, it is often very difficult and time consuming to select those relatively few fan sites to run advertisements. For one thing, it is often difficult to identify those fan sites that are frequented by a number of potential customers. Further, it is even more difficult to measure the effectiveness of the advertisements placed on any particular fan site.
Such difficulties in identifying the target fan sites are even more pronounced when the brands being advertised or marketed are for a niche market such as the automotive aftermarket industry, for example. The automotive aftermarket is already fragmented into a number of different market segments such as parts for trucks, sport compact cars, domestic performance cars, luxury SUVs, etc. Therefore, it is not an easy task for an aftermarket manufacturer, which is often a small or medium-sized business with limited resources and marketing budget, to select one or more aftermarket car enthusiast fan sites that will serve as an effective venue for its marketing campaign.
Further, although these fan sites typically provide an advertising tracking program, they generally only indicate how many people saw the ad and how many people clicked on it without any further information on ad effectiveness. In addition, the fan site operator typically provides advertising tracking information once in a while by sending an e-mail, for example, and the advertiser has no way of validating their data. Therefore, it is very difficult to quantitatively assess which site is truly better than another site.
Further, since each site has its own paperwork and processes for accepting ads and ad money, ranging from very formal to very informal, an advertiser must spend extra time to track which placement invoices should be coming for which sites and for how long.
To further complicate the matter, the existing banner images may not be ideal for all of the sites that the advertisements are to be placed on. In this case, separate ads should be crafted for certain specific sites, which makes tracking even more complicated and the advertiser must keep track of which ads go to which sites. In addition, when the advertiser's products change and/or a new feature is added, the advertiser must re-do all of his advertising banners to reflect the changes and resubmit them to the appropriate sites. This may involve sending e-mails to all of the various site owners.
Other problems associated with online advertisements and marketing that prevent many businesses from effectively utilizing the web for advertising brands or products include: 1) difficulty in monitoring positive and negative comments on user forums, fan sites and/or the like that can make noticeable impacts on sales, as it is difficult and time consuming to monitor the thousands of user forums and other sites on the web; 2) lack of advertisers' knowledge or expertise in gauging the quality of the vendors' sites and limited availability of tools for measuring the performance of the online placements that are purchased, even when advertisers want to diversify their ad spending and advertising on enthusiast web sites; and 3) difficulty in monitoring unauthorized retailers who sell fake products because small or medium-sized businesses generally cannot afford to spend the time to monitor the entire web for unauthorized dealers.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide tools that will facilitate the advertisers, manufacturers or brand managers to locate the most suitable fan sites that are frequented by the target audience, and to monitor the effectiveness of any advertisements that are placed on these fan sites. Further, it is desirable to provide tools that can be used by the advertisers or manufacturers to monitor dissemination of information regarding their brand names or products over the global computer networks.